Information is Beautiful Awards 2017: “Visualisation without story is nothing”

MA Data Journalism students Carmen Aguilar Garcia and Victoria Oliveres attended the Information is Beautiful awards this week and spoke to some of the nominees and winners. In a guest post for OJB they give a rundown of the highlights, plus insights from data visualisation pioneers Nadieh Bremer, Duncan Clark and Alessandro Zotta.

Bremer graduated as an Astronomer in 2011, but a couple of years working as an Analytic Consultant were enough for her to understand that her passion was data visualisation. For the past year she has been exploring this world by herself.

“If you don’t have some interesting insight of the story to share,” she said, “your dataviz is just going to disappear into the world of ‘just google for bad infographics’”.

Beside her short freelance career, she has already been recognized with the Outstanding Individual award this year.

“Dataviz itself is built on the fundamental of the story. They both need each other, but the visualisation without the story is nothing,” says Nadieh.

And she wasn’t the only one in saying that. The importance of storytelling was a recurring theme throughout the night.

Eric Salama, CEO of Kantar, opened the night highlighting the “big difference” that data visualisation is making in explaining stories. But he warned that “It’s not the technique, it’s about the story to help you to understand what is happening”.

Previous winner Duncan Clark was also nominee to this category for his new project Flourish, which “isn’t typical for the Information is Beautiful Awards, because it’s a toolkit rather than a graphic”.

The toolkit offers “infinite flexibility and a storytelling layer, which already supports ‘stepper’-style stories but over time will support audio, scrolling and more”, said Clark.

More ‘scrollitelling’

Nadieh Bremer has noticed an evolution in the shortlist this year. “We are moving towards more ‘scrollitelling’”, she says. “The dataviz itself is becoming more complex. The more complex (data visualisations) are actually winning and they are getting more comfortable [with non-standard projects].”

Not only is there diversity among winning projects, she feels, but also in the winners. Students from Density Design, for example, were awarded Studio of the Year and also took home two awards and an honourable mention: Gold in the Current Affairs & Politics category, Silver in Humanitarian/Global, and the honourable mention in the Rising Star category for Giacomo Flaim‘s works including Are you sure you want to smoke?

In this Research Lab – rather than a usual studio – the students start from their “own curiosity to learn about a topic”, says winner Alessandro Zotta.

For him, “dataviz is not the objective of the course but the tool that you use to understand phenomenon and controversy.”

All these projects were designed during their course in Communication Design in the Politecnico di Milano, an achievement that sets the bar high for future data visualizers and shows the strength of talent among new arrivals in the field.